Generally, integrated circuits and other semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as computers, cellular phones, personal computing devices, and many other applications. Home, industrial, and automotive devices, which in the past included only mechanical components, now have electronic parts that require semiconductor devices.
Semiconductor devices are manufactured by depositing many different types of material layers over a semiconductor workpiece or wafer, and patterning the various material layers using lithography. The material layers typically include thin films of conductive, semiconductive, and insulating materials that are patterned and etched to form integrated circuits (IC's). There may be a plurality of transistors, memory devices, switches, conductive lines, diodes, capacitors, logic circuits, and other electronic components formed on a single die or chip.
Lithography involves the transfer of an image of a mask to a material layer of a die or chip, also referred to as a wafer. The image is formed in a layer of photoresist, the photoresist is developed, and the photoresist is used as a mask during a process to alter the material layer, such as etching and patterning the material layer.
As feature sizes of semiconductor devices continue to decrease, as is the trend in the semiconductor industry, transferring patterns from a lithography mask to a material layer of a semiconductor device becomes more difficult, due to the effects of the light or energy used to expose the photoresist. A phenomenon referred to as the “proximity effect” results in the line width of patterns varying, depending on the proximity of a feature to other features. Closely-spaced features tend to be smaller than widely-spaced features, although on a lithography mask they include the same dimensions. It is important in many semiconductor device designs for features to have uniform, predictable dimensions across a surface of a wafer to achieve the required device performance.
To compensate for the proximity effect, optical proximity corrections (OPC) are often made to lithography masks, which may involve adjusting the widths or lengths of the lines on the mask. In a typical OPC run set development cycle, a model based OPC followed by an optical rules check (ORC) is performed to look for lithographic weakpoints. The ORC evaluates a full simulated contour of an opening formed in the photoresist layer when the photoresist is exposed using the lithography masks. The run set is then modified based on the errors found during the ORC run. Model based OPC and ORC are then performed using this updated target layer and the cycle is repeated until no ORC errors appear.
The OPC run set development cycle is time-consuming, and therefore costly. It is often desirable to introduce a product as quickly as possible to the market in the semiconductor device industry. However, it may take days or even weeks for the OPC run set development calculations to be performed on a semiconductor device design.
As such, it is desirable to provide faster and more efficient methods and systems of performing an OPC run set development cycle for lithography masks used to fabricate semiconductor devices. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the inventive subject matter will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the inventive subject matter and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the inventive subject matter.